Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin Read Free Book Online

man, at my school. He asked, “Matthew, how do you see your life?”
    “I don’t know. I just want to finish college and get a job and have a husband. I just want to be a housewife. I want to cook and I want to clean. I want to take care of the kids. I want to do all that.”
    “You know what you sound like? You sound like a traditional woman.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Everything that you’re saying is from a woman’s perspective. Staying home, cooking, taking care of kids. That’s what women do, traditionally. That’s what they were known to do.”
    “Okay, then, I guess I’m a traditional woman.”
    At that point, I had done my research. I told him, “I want to be a woman, but I’m very scared to do it. I’m afraid I’d be rejected by society, and that would make my life worse.”
    “Well, whatever you do, you should do it after high school.”
    “Okay.”
    Then I read that if you wait too long, the hormones are not going to be as effective. If you take hormones at sixteen, you’re basically going through another puberty stage. When you take hormones at forty, it kind of doesn’t have the same effect. When you’re sixteen, you’re still growing. If you replace your hormones, you won’t grow as tall or your bones won’t be as big. That’s why I wish I had started at sixteen. I wouldn’t be so tall. I didn’t get hormones until I was eighteen, which is when Callen-Lorde allows you to do it.
    At this point, only my school counselor and my brother knew that I was planning to transition. My brother knew a lot of transgender girls. He took me around to the Village (Greenwich Village), the Village Pier on Christopher Street, where there are lots transgender girls. They fascinated me. They looked so real. This has always been my worry: Am I going to look real? I don’t want to
not
look real, because, I mean, what’s the point?
    That summer, right before her senior year at the all-boys high school, Christina decided to become female. She stopped worrying about what her mother would think. She was going to do what she needed to do, what she had to do.

    When I told my best friend, Hoay, that I wanted to become a girl, he said, “No, don’t do that.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because God made you a boy for a reason. And if he made you this way, it’s for a purpose.”
    “Well, what’s my purpose? I have no idea what my purpose is as a boy. I’m not going to have a kid. I’m not going to marry a woman.”
    “You told me that you are gay and now you’re saying you’re transgender. Why can’t you just be a gay man?”
    I told him that I
thought
that I was gay because I was attracted to men. But I’m attracted to straight men, not gay men. Before I educated myself about what being transgender really is, I thought that I must be a gay person.
    The Google site said, “Sexual orientation has nothing to do with gender identity. There are gay transgenders and there are straight transgenders.”
    That was something really hard for the boys to grasp. It took at least two years for Hoay to get accustomed to calling me
she,
to actually believe I was a woman, to see me as a woman.

    Transitioning is a very long process. We go through stages. First we look like a man. Then we go through gender bending. And eventually we look like a woman. Gender bending is when you don’t look like a male and you don’t look like a female. You’re changing from one gender to another.
    My hair was short. With short hair, I looked like a boy. I had to grow it out. Because I was gender bending, I started to dress feminine. But I still looked like a boy. People would say to me, “What are you?” Total strangers.
    I loved the attention back then. It’s really weird. It’s really weird because now if people think I’m a man, it sometimes turns me into a very violent person. I’ve gotten into countless fights with people.
    Christina says this calmly while laughing at herself.
    I know — that’s masculine.

    My hair grew